She did open the door to him, but she stood squarely in the middle of the threshold and didn’t invite him in. Her body language wasn’t difficult to read: arms folded tightly across her chest; chin thrust out, but trembling slightly. Edward felt like a character in a sitcom, the husband caught with lipstick on his collar. Just let me ’splain, Lucy. The only thing missing was the canned laughter. He shredded the flower, which he’d briefly considered handing her as a peace offering.
“Carpe diem, right?” Ellen said. “Or maybe I should say seize the man. You’re quite a fast worker, Schuyler.”
“It’s not like that,” Edward said. In all those hours, he hadn’t come up with anything more intelligent or persuasive to say. “It’s a long story.”
“I don’t think I have time for that,” she said.
“Then I’ll make it short,” he said. “She was my old girlfriend, my fiancée once, actually. She just showed up and needed a place to stay.” The Reader’s Digest version of his history with Laurel.
“I see,” Ellen said, although that was highly improbable. “Edward, you really don’t owe me anything. We barely know each other. And we had an embarrassing moment, but now it’s over.”
“May I come in?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“May I call you, then?”
“Not right now,” she said. “I have a lot of things to sort out. You probably do, too.”
As he pedaled back to the cottage, he realized that he’d never asked her where she’d been for the last couple of days. How could he?—it would be like trying to make small talk in the middle of a disaster. But he wondered if whatever she had to “sort out” was related exclusively to him. He found himself pumping slowly, doggedly, like a cardiac patient on a stationary bike. God, he couldn’t take all this drama. How he missed Bee right then, and not just her, but the safety net, the delightful, sane, predictable days of their marriage.
He decided to go to the cookout at Peggy and Ike’s the next night. If Ellen showed up, he might have an opportunity to talk to her again, to ease the residual tension of their doorstep conversation. And if she wasn’t there, he would just try to unwind in the calm, friendly atmosphere of a party. In the meantime, he tried to direct his attention away from himself. He started just after supper with a phone call to Julie, to make up for his earlier distraction.
But she wasn’t home, and he was treated to a voice-mail message he’d never heard before, a few bars of a song by a male vocal group that seemed to go, “Whassup, my brother? Whassup, my sister?” followed abruptly by a beep. Maybe he’d dialed the wrong number. Edward cleared his throat and said, “Well, sorry I missed you. I’ll try again later.” If it was Julie’s phone, she’d recognize his caller I.D., if not his strained voice. And if he’d reached a stranger, his message was suitably anonymous and innocuous.
He called Nick and Amanda next, and the phone rang several times before Nick picked up and said, “What.” Edward hadn’t heard that belligerent tone in Nick’s voice since he was a kid. And where was Amanda, who always picked up another extension simultaneously? He hoped he hadn’t called them in the middle of a quarrel. And then he remembered Julie’s news about them trying to have a baby, and realized that he’d probably interrupted them in bed.
Edward thought of all the times Nick or Julie had interrupted him and Bee in the early days of their marriage, how they’d freeze in an embrace behind their locked bedroom door at the sound of knocking, how the children seemed to have some special radar that picked up the first hint of sexual contact. “What are you doing?” Julie might say, rattling the knob. “The door is stuck.” Nick would want to know where his Walkman or his Pogo Ball was, as if they were hiding it under their mattress.
“It’s Dad,” Edward said into the telephone. Good old Dad, with his perfect timing. Maybe it ran in the family.
“Hey,” Nick said. “We’re just in the middle of … of a movie. Is everything okay up there? Can we get back to you later?”
Why did Edward persist in thinking they all needed him—that his absence, even for a month, left them disorganized and defenseless?
At least he could count on Gladys being home after dark and not too busy to talk to him, unless she was in an emergency room somewhere. There had been another scare, less than a month ago—a fainting spell—another little rehearsal for the real thing. How would it be to go around thinking of your life as a tentative, ironic gift? Why didn’t everyone feel that way all the time? That was the miracle, really, that we live as if we were immortal, that we shout “Hello!” to each other when “Good-bye!” would be so much more appropriate.
But Gladys answered the phone in a robust voice, with other, even livelier voices in the background. “Do you have company?” Edward asked.
“Only Keith Olbermann and that darling Rachel,” she said. “Hold on a minute.”
After a while, the background voices were cut off and Gladys said, “Did you hear the news?”
“Has something happened?” he asked, suddenly filled with apprehension about the larger world he’d left behind.
“Yes!” she said. “Nicky is trying to become a father!”
Well, that certainly hadn’t been on MSNBC. “Did he tell you that?”
“No, no,” Gladys said. “Julie did. But don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s a secret.”
Some secret. If it were up to Julie, it would be on the evening news.
Then Gladys said, “So, are you having a nice time, honey?” and he almost burst into tears, or into a babbling confession of his screwed-up love life. But of course he didn’t. He was confident that in Gladys’s mind he still belonged to Bee.
Real Life
Ellen didn’t show up at the Martins’ cookout. Edward mingled with the other guests, trying to be sociable and not seem preoccupied, but he was like Bingo two years earlier, wandering the rooms of the house on Larkspur Lane, looking for Bee. When he finally worked up the nerve to ask about Ellen, as offhandedly as he could, Peggy said, “Oh, she was going to come, but then she canceled last night. She said she was coming down with something, some bug she must have picked up in Connecticut.”
So that’s where she’d been, where she spent the rest of the year in what he now thought of as her real life, where she lived and worked. Edward imagined some real estate transaction, a closing or a mortgage issue, that had required her presence. But then Peggy said, “I think she and her ex had some matters to iron out.” When she saw Edward’s face, she hastily added, “But she’s back now, and this is probably just some twenty-four-hour virus.”
He immediately saw the double standard of his thinking, the sophistry of the jealous rumbling in his chest. Even if Ellen had unfinished business with her husband, even if sex was a part of it, who was he to complain? Laurel had been in his bed and was still, to his surprise, very much on his mind. In fact, he had decided to call her. Without an emotional investment, he had nothing to lose. Had he reverted to the player he’d been between Laurel and Bee? No, of course not; he was way past all that. And he’d known absolute love since then, which was as good as a conversion. He would always long for it again. This would just be an intermediate dalliance.
That night he did phone Laurel, and she said, “I was afraid you’d forgotten about me,” but not accusingly, or even in a self-pitying tone.
“That would be pretty hard to do,” he said.
Their conversation was friendly and flirtatious. “Tu me manques,” she said. She missed him, in two languages, and she never asked about the woman with the flowers at the door. Edward was aroused by her voice, by images he’d held of her body, of what they’d done together, recently and long ago. But he would call the shots this time around, keeping it uncomplicated and light. They made a date in the city for the evening after he got back to Englewood.
Then, two days before he left the Vineyard, he ran into Ellen at the checkout counter in the market. His pulse accelerated at the sight of her. They had unfinished business betwe
en them, too, although its nature wasn’t entirely clear. “Is the moratorium on phoning you over yet?” he asked.
After a beat, she said, “You’re leaving soon, aren’t you? I am, too. Maybe we can speak after we’re both home. I’ll give you my number there.” She borrowed a pen from the grocery checker. He started to turn up his palm, but she’d pulled a receipt from a shopping bag and, leaning on the counter, scribbled on it. “Safe trip back,” she said, handing him the receipt.
“You, too,” he answered, and he could swear his palm tingled, as if it had been slapped.
Back in Englewood, in his own real life, there was garden work to do and email to read and answer. He’d had his bills forwarded to the Vineyard, and Mildred had come by to water the plants and check on the house, so things were pretty much in order. But there was a static feeling inside the rooms that couldn’t be dispelled by simply opening the blinds and windows to let in sunlight and air. “Well, we’re home,” he said to Bingo. “What do you think of that?” Although he’d sworn he wouldn’t become one of those geezers who held one-way conversations with their dogs.
Laurel’s third-floor walkup in Chelsea, with its thrown-together, thrift-shop décor, seemed youthful and temporary. It reminded Edward of Julie’s place in Hell’s Kitchen, except Laurel didn’t have a roommate, for which he was very grateful. Minutes after he arrived, still a little winded from the stairs, they were in each other’s arms. Sex first, then a nap, and then a hand-in-hand stroll through the neighborhood, which was filled with a variety of restaurants, to find the perfect place for supper. Edward discovered that he had a great appetite for all of it.
If Ellen entered his thoughts once in a while, and Bee far more often, he kept it to himself and didn’t really feel disloyal to anyone. This was life, with its proverbial, restorative way of going on. He didn’t tell anybody about his reunion with Laurel, either, and didn’t consider himself duplicitous. It was a private matter, the honeymoon he was denied decades ago, only without the wedding, and in Manhattan rather than abroad. You don’t take anyone else along, even metaphorically, even on a metaphorical honeymoon.
But he didn’t invite her to Englewood, and she didn’t ask to go there. Everything fit neatly into its own compartment: his immutable connection to his family; his friendships in the city and those close to home; and this strange, pleasurable interlude with Laurel. That’s what he told himself it was, because he didn’t really expect it to last. He just wanted to relish it while he could. Despite all the evidence of her new stability and the remorse she’d expressed for the past, he was still being cautious, watching for signs of the old restless and capricious Laurel, the one capable of disappearing as abruptly as she’d reappeared.
One day he could arrive as arranged at her apartment—he had keys to both the outer and inner doors now (a mere convenience, as she’d said)—and find strangers living there. Was that uncertainty part of the thrill for him? If so, it was definitely out of character. He was famously steadfast, a man of habit who took satisfaction from the quotidian, from people he could count on and who could count on him. Or at least he used to be. Maybe he would pull the disappearing act this time.
He’d intended to call Ellen, playing it cool to match her detachment by waiting a few days after he was home. But when he looked for the receipt with her Darien, Connecticut, number on it, he couldn’t find it. Lost in the laundry, maybe, or left in the Vineyard rental along with his blue swim trunks and an unopened bottle of Pinot Noir. He remembered the second letter from Laurel, when she’d signed herself “Ann” and asked if the dog had eaten her first letter. That’s what he might have told Ellen about the receipt, after he got her number from information. But he found out that she was unlisted. He couldn’t remember the name of the real estate firm she worked for, and the minimal detective work required to figure that out seemed formidable. Of course he could have simply asked the Martins for her number, but he thought that Peggy had sensed his rift with Ellen, and didn’t want to arouse her curiosity. So he let it go for the time being.
On the few occasions he told Laurel he couldn’t see her because of a family commitment or other plans, she didn’t question him or sulk or even ask to be included. She seemed to understand the unwritten rules of their new relationship. So he saw the kids and Gladys whenever he felt like it, and went to Sybil and Henry’s for dinner, unaccompanied and unafraid. There were inquiries about his social life. Julie asked if that “old friend” had gotten in touch with him again, and he blithely lied about it. Sybil wondered aloud if he’d met anyone while he was on vacation, and when he said, “No one special,” she looked at him sharply, but he withstood her scrutiny for once and simply enjoyed his dinner.
But when he ran into Bernie one evening on the way to Laurel’s, he felt compelled to talk about her, without being directly asked. How did the conversation start? Bernie said something crude and intrusive, like “Getting any?” and Edward had an unexpected, adolescent urge to share his newfound excitement.
No details, of course—they were light-years from adolescence—only the fact that he and Laurel were involved again. He was suddenly bursting with that revelation, the way Julie needed to betray Amanda’s confidence about trying to become pregnant. Did Edward want approval or envy? Not exactly, although he remembered the dreamy look on Bernie’s face when he’d mentioned the silver halo of hair Laurel once had. This time, though, Bernie just seemed incredulous. “You’re kidding,” he said. “How did that happen?”
“It happened,” Edward said. “How doesn’t really matter.”
“Well, good luck,” Bernie said, clapping him on the shoulder, a little too hard. He was about to say something else, but then he seemed to change his mind. “Good luck,” he said again before going off down the street.
Separate Lives
One afternoon, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, Laurel leaned toward him just as the main feature was starting and said, “Is there someone else, Edward?”
They were holding hands, but he was settling deeply into his seat, ready to give himself over to the life and landscape of the movie, an Australian crime drama, and the question, her voice in the plush darkness, startled him. “What do you mean?” he whispered. A woman sitting behind them said, “Shhh!” and Laurel turned to glower at her before putting her free hand up to Edward’s lips. “Later,” she whispered back.
Going to the movies in the afternoon had always seemed like a guilty pleasure to Edward, an instant escape from the glare of daylight and the business of the outside world. Laurel had suggested this particular movie, and she was good at conjuring up other means of entertainment. Since Edward’s return from the Vineyard, they’d taken the Staten Island Ferry, followed by a picnic in Clove Lake Park; gone to Chinatown, where they ate at a communal table with a large Chinese family, none of whom spoke English, isolating the two of them in a silly, yet romantic way; read the first pages of several books sitting on the floor in the aisles of the Chelsea Barnes & Noble; and lay, gently vibrating, in side-by-side massage chairs at Hammacher Schlemmer.
They’d done many similar things together when they were younger, and even if some of them seemed a bit juvenile to Edward now, he was moved by Laurel’s delight in revisiting old habits and haunts. Then there was the lovely lovemaking, the culmination of most of their outings. It was like having two separate lives, both satisfying, that never had to merge or even collide. That, he found out soon after they’d left the theater, was what was bothering her and had provoked her question at the start of the movie.
“I dated a married man for a while in Arizona,” she said, “and it was something like this.”
He felt a small charge, as if he’d touched a frayed wire. In his head, he heard: I almost got married once before, you know. “You’ve never mentioned that, have you?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she said.
“Laurel,” he said. “You know that I’m not married. And I don’t have the energy or the impulse to be seeing another woman. You st
ill wear me out, I’m happy to say.” They were walking down Broadway and he reached for her hand again, but she pulled it away.
“But you’re not always available,” she said.
It was true; he wasn’t always free to be with her. Her uncommon patience, her easy acceptance of this arrangement was always going to expire; he just hadn’t thought it would happen this soon. And he’d seldom lapsed into talking about Bee to her, but Laurel had what appeared to be uncanny intuition about such matters, and a history of unfounded jealousy. Of course, she’d been the unfaithful one, but he didn’t point that out, and he didn’t say he’d assumed it was his turn to be selfish. If he wasn’t able to let go of the past, they couldn’t move on, even as a loosely attached couple. “Sometimes,” he said, “I need to see old friends.”
“You never invite me along, though, do you?”
“You’re right, I don’t,” he said. “Maybe I just want to keep you all to myself.” On our protracted faux honeymoon. He almost believed his own glib answer for a moment.
She rolled her eyes. Then she said, “Or maybe you’re, I don’t know, ashamed of me or something.”
Was he? No, it was more complicated than that. He was still ashamed—even after all this time—of having been dumped at the altar, and of hiding that whole episode of his life as if it had never happened. What he didn’t have the impulse or energy for was explaining Laurel to anyone, of revealing himself, in his youth, as an innocent dupe, or of trying to justify their reunion.
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